Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Meeting Notes/2021-10-19

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Call details[edit]

Presentation material[edit]

Notes[edit]

Ewan McAndrew: Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh since January 2016

  • Presentation title: Witchy Wikidata: In which Wikidata brings Magic to information and data literacy for a spell
  • Have a 4 page spread in “History Scotland” magazine about this project.
  • Supports key institutional commitments to open knowledge, information literacy, digital & data skills, and Equality & Diversity alongside library employees
  • Looking to support open practice to enable university to engage in OER: Have OER policy since 2015
  • Students and staff finding Wikipedia incredibly useful; need to support them in practice
  • This project enabled working with student interns in a productive way, particularly Emma’s internship as “Witchfinder General”
  • Students were tasked with creating practical data visualizations, part of building core competencies
  • Data is the new Bacon: have a new priority to create new data literate workforce
  • Can open up research datasets for further research
  • Success of Emma’s work has led to mapping the Scottish Reformation project: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/help-consultancy/is-skills/wikimedia/wikidata/use-cases/mapping-the-scottish-reformation Thus now have 2 rich datasets for people to engage with.
  • Common critique of data science classes: examples are static and is in “artificial” and “academic” context:
  • So how can we look at how to make data science classes more relevant to real-world problems?
  • Have Data Fair in October: Pitched Scottish Witchcraft database
  • Database initially delivered in 2003 in MS Access database
  • Started by looking at biographical data on the witches
  • One field that all the accused witches had were place

Emma Carroll, Data and Visualisation Intern, University of Edinburgh

  • Presentation title: The Wicked Findings of the Witchfinder General
  • Historical context: during 1563-1736: witchcraft illegal; thousands charged
  • Survey of Witchcraft Database formed 2001-2003
    • Documents 3,212 named people that were charged
    • Over 300 fields of info recorded in database, including geographical data
  • Project aim: Locate the geographical info recorded and visualize the results in different creative ways during 3 month internship
    • 1st part: Learn the basics behind Wikidata
      • All of named accused witches have Wikidata pages
      • Data can be easily added
      • And learned to use query service, which was later helpful in creating visualizations
    • Step 1: Residence location finding for 3,112 named places
      • Used Google Sheets Wikidata plugin
      • Places:  http://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/
      • Place-name investigation research required lots of consultation of historical sources/records
      • Then needed to add places to Wikidata, including coordinates
      • Was able to create basic map: https://w.wiki/5Kf
      • Still had around 100 difficult to find places: sought advice from different experts
      • Now 25 place-names (out of initial 800+) still need to be located
    • Step 2: Adding other locations
    • Step 3: Adding extra information to Wikidata
      • Build a profile for each accused witch
      • Cause and manner of death, torture type, ordeal type, charges, ethnicity added (had to request properties to be added, such as torture type): http://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/torture/
      • Then started adding temporal data: Time of trial, date of confession
      • Suddenly these accused witches had a time and place in Wikidata
    • Step 4: Visualisations
      • How to bring data in Wikidata to life?
      • Used Wikidata query service throughout the project to create simple maps: helped to quality check.
      • Many different options to pick from: Leaflet, ArcGIS Online, Storymap
      • Created a website to host different maps together: worked out really well so users could jump from map to map
      • Leaflet map with Timeline function: http://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/timeline/
      • ArcGIS online: took the lead where she was able to play around with different maps
      • Other Visualisations included Cloropleth map, Story map, Linked map, and Bubble chart.
      • Gained Insights to the data, such as witchcraft cases linked to other events in region
      • Final outcome
        • Geo-located residence of 3,141 accused witches
        • Added lots of info to Wikidata (36,000 edits)
        • Located trial, detainment & death locations
        • Learnt many new skills from using Wikidata, OpenRefine, ArcGIS
        • Project is documented with weekly blog posts with visualisations: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/ecarroll3_witchcraft_visualisation/
        • Other outcomes filter into the community, such as people have been interested in setting up memorials for accused witches in the area

Questions[edit]

  • 2 previous presentations on Scottish witches/clerics have occurred: all part of the same team?
    • Two different projects, have been able to get in touch with them as well as help with other projects.
  • Heard from any historians who have been making use of work in research?
    • Yes, project was released 2 years ago, there’s been a lot of contact from historians: have helped a lot of other projects by pointing them in the right direction.
    • Tweet from professor about Emma’s work went viral; lot of local newspapers getting in touch with them.
    • Have received some constructive criticism, but that can be helpful too.
    • Ewan sees possibilities of taking this data in different directions, but his role at the institution is helping facilitate others to engage with and create such projects.
    • Will be doing work on improving the existing site and also different facets such as shape-changing, maybe including icons, with the caveat that we need to be wary of not trivializing the data.
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